


still waiting on a rumor of summer

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-29 21:36:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18302372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: So John is dead. So Rachel is alone. Now what?





	still waiting on a rumor of summer

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, Rachel Duncan. I sure do miss you a lot!

The hotel room at the Regent is fully stocked with alcohol – or, rather, it _was_ fully stocked with alcohol. After Ferdinand, Rachel had drained six of the bottles from the minibar and collapsed in a heap on the bed. She’d wept, and screamed, and written a dramatic letter. And then the hangover. And then Felix and Detective Bell sweeping into her hotel room. And then, and then, and then, and now she is here – and John is dead, and Rachel is alone, and there is only one small bottle of sparkling wine left in the minibar. When she cracks the top off of it, it fizzes pathetically and then goes still.

On the other side of the curtains, the sun is rising; it smothers the migraine-green of the neon sign outside of the window, turns it a sickly and unmemorable color. Rachel drains the wine, which tastes the way the light looks. She drops the bottle on the floor and watches it bounce, once, and then lay still.

Now what.

Now, what.

Now: what?

The question echoes around the inside of her skull, ricocheting off of her migraine and burrowing into her eye socket. It hums in time with her heartbeat: _now what, now what, now what_.

So John is dead. So Rachel is alone. So DYAD has collapsed in on itself like a burnt-out star and left Rachel on the outside, blinded, holding the murder weapon. Sarah and her family are free – to celebrate, to sleep, to live – and they have gotten every last piece of what they need from Rachel. There is nothing left to take from Rachel, so they won’t be coming back. Now what?

The first thing she does is stand up from the chair – listen to her bones pop – wander into the attached bathroom. Ferdinand’s straight razor and shaving cream are still lined up neatly on the sink; she sweeps them off, listens to them clatter against the ground. She wets the tips of her fingers with ice-cold water and scrabbles madly, frantically, against the skin of her throat. The concealer liquefies and pours in dribbles down the sides of her neck and: there, the bruises. Ten. She touches a fingertip to each of them, one by one, and then rolls her eyes (eyes?) (eye) up to the ceiling so that she can do her best to drive back the tears.

So Ferdinand is dead. So Ferdinand refused to stay with her, and bit the hand that reached for him, and fled, and died. So Ferdinand is dead.

So Siobhan is dead. So Siobhan put a hand on Rachel’s hand – just once – and asked her, softly, to help. So Siobhan looked at Rachel and said _please, be kind_ , and Rachel was kind to her – in the only way she knew how to be kind – and it wasn’t enough, and Rachel’s mistakes bit Rachel’s hand and bit Siobhan’s hand too. So Siobhan is dead.

So John is dead. So John called Rachel a blessing, a triumph, a resolution, a pinnacle; so he was lying. So he lied to her and jerked her around on puppet strings and lost, hilariously – hilariously – hilariously – hilariously he lost to Sarah, who is Rachel’s worst and sharpest mistake. So John is dead.

So Rachel is alone. Now:

She takes one of the hand towels from by the sink and holds her breath so that the stink of Ferdinand’s aftershave does not choke her. She smears the concealer off of her throat, drops the towel on the floor, goes back into the hotel room. When she shoves the curtains all the way open, the sun comes pouring in like watered-down regret.

This room is so red. Like the inside of a heart. Carnal.

Rachel lets her body fold itself down into the chair by the window; she stares dully into the makeup mirror that lingers there, and her reflection stares back at her with its own glass eye. They sit, alone, in the room. They listen to the sound of the dust, and the way Rachel’s breathing keeps lapsing into hiccups. The mouth of the reflection says nothing. The eye of the reflection says nothing. It looks down and picks up a tube of concealer from the table, and coincidentally Rachel does too. They erase Ferdinand’s fingerprints from their throats with synchronized clockwork gestures.

It’s quiet in here. Now – what. Detective Bell tossed her passport onto the bed when he left; it lies there, intact, the plane ticket still tucked inside. Zurich. She’s been there…four times, maybe. When she was Rachel Duncan. Now she is – what. What? She doesn’t know, she doesn’t want to think about it. Foundation on the skin of her face. Concealer. Bronzer, blush, highlighter.

She leans in closer to the mirror and puts eyeliner and mascara on her one brown eye.

When she’s done, she puts everything back in the bag and zips it up. Ferdinand had gotten her makeup bag from her apartment; he’d gotten her a suitcase full of clothes, and her passport, and a tall stack of currency. The Rachel of two days ago, drowning dozily in a haze of painkillers, had thought that this was love. If it was love, though, he wouldn’t have left her. So now she doesn’t know what it is.

 

(Now what?)

 

Rachel stands up and puts the makeup bag in her suitcase. She closes her suitcase. She picks up the passport and studies the ticket tucked inside of it, presses one finger to the date and time: today. If she goes, it has to be today.

She doesn’t have to go. She could—

Well, she couldn’t. But if she did. She could—

Not that she would ever. But.

She could go. They could want her. They could welcome her inside. She could say _I have nothing, now, there is nothing left for me_ and they could say _that’s not true, you have—_

And that is a fantasy. A stupid fantasy. They wouldn’t want her anyways, so it doesn’t really matter. It isn’t an option. She doesn’t want them, and they don’t want her, and she has to go, which means she has to go today.

Instead of going, Rachel sits on the bed. Her bare feet do not touch the floor. She misses – not Ferdinand, but the idea of Ferdinand as someone she could miss. She misses the painkillers; inside the warm bubble of them, it had been easy to shape her mouth around the word _love_. She misses love. There isn’t anywhere she could go to get it, because all of the people who could have loved her are dead. Every single one of them is dead.

But she could go. She could go to Siobhan’s house, and knock on the door, and wait for Sarah to open it. She would say _Hello_ , _Sarah_ , and then perhaps she’d smile (no) (she’d smirk) and take in a breath,

and Sarah would slam the door in her face. Sarah would be entitled to this, and she would take advantage of the opportunity. It doesn’t matter what Rachel wants – even if she did want to be with them, at the end of things. She doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t. To be surrounded by that same, familiar face would be—

It would just be—

And Sarah is grieving the loss of her mother, swallowed in the jaws of Rachel’s goddamn mistakes. She has no time for the cold hangover-hollows of Rachel’s grief; even if she did have time she wouldn’t want it – the grief – and Rachel wouldn’t go there, anyways, ever. She wouldn’t go. She doesn’t want them. They don’t want her. She is alone.

So it has to be today, then.

Zurich. Rachel claws her way out of the chair and back to standing, paces in limping circles around the hotel room. The IV bag – leave it. The wardrobe – don’t open it, not worth it for the remnants Ferdinand may or may not left behind. The discarded pocketwatch on the ground – abandon it. The bathroom – oh, the painkillers. She does need the painkillers.

In the bathroom: the tiled floor, the shower that she is too exhausted to consider using. The mirror she ignores. The straight razor and shaving cream on the floor; the partially-unpacked shaving kit abandoned on top of the toilet. There are no toothbrushes or brushes or soap, because Ferdinand wasn’t really the sort of man to think about those things. He got her clothes, and money, and a doctor to stitch up her eye socket. He got himself a straight razor. When his plans failed, he tried to kill her. Afterwards, he killed Siobhan. Rachel takes her painkiller bottles in one slightly-trembling hand, and then makes yet another mistake: she looks in the mirror. Her reflection confronts her. It looks exactly like her, only with a black hole where its eye should be.

It still won’t confess anything. Even here, at the end of things – it refuses to make anything easy.

She closes the bathroom door behind her when she leaves.

The painkillers go in the side pockets of her suitcase; Rachel takes one pill, swallows it dry before dropping the rattling bottles into the pockets and zipping up the bag. The painkiller shoves itself down her throat like a small animal trying to flee from her. It takes too long. It makes her throat hurt. Her throat hurts. She wishes the painkiller would work immediately, because she misses Ferdinand and wishes that she didn’t; she misses the painkillers, she misses her eye, she misses the oily slide of the gin. She misses its artificial bravery. Rachel isn’t brave at all, now – she wasn’t brave then either, but at least she could play at it.

She wishes the painkiller would work. She wishes she knew what to do with herself – and knew with an absolute certainty that it was the right thing to do. Every step up to this point had seemed so certain, so inevitable. Hindsight has half the field of vision, but it’s twice as sharp; if she hadn’t cut out her eye, if she had given Sarah the data earlier, if she had lied to Marion, if she hadn’t lied to Delphine, if she had run away from the Duncans’ large and comfortable house in the suburbs of Cambridge when she was five years old – if, then, and at the end of the story she would have the relief of being something besides this. Something other than herself.

She sits down, cross-legged on the ground. Dust floats in the watered-down light; there is no sound except the dry rasp of Rachel’s breathing. Alive, still. Despite everything.

It would be nice if she had made different or fewer mistakes. Another Rachel could pack her bag, now, and take it in hand, and go to Siobhan’s house, and say: _isn’t it something, that we made it? Despite everything?_ A different Rachel would have sisters. She could reach out her hands; when she reached for her sisters, they’d reach back for her.

But that’s not this story, is it.

The Rachel of this story stands up and watches the way her fingers shake. She thinks: _I want_. Then she thinks: _I miss_. Then she thinks: _I hurt_ —

—and she does, she hurts. She hurts because the painkillers haven’t taken effect yet, and she hurts because two nights ago Ferdinand grabbed her hands in his hands and said _I bloody love you_ and there, then, just for that second, she was a thing that could be loved – she was lovable, she had finally done it. She had thought – and now she doesn’t, now she knows. Knowing is worse. Thinking, believing, hoping…those things were kinder.

Rachel closes her shaking hands into fists; when she opens them, she is alone in the room and also she is alone. There is nothing else that she can take with her. She closes the suitcase. She pulls the zipper tight, all the way around. She sets it on its wheels. She tugs on a pair of high-heeled shoes that make her bones ache, because of course they were the only shoes Ferdinand had thought to bring her. One step, two steps – and she can still walk in them. It hurts, but she can still walk in them.

There is no last-minute knock at the door, from anyone. There isn’t another monster to fight, one final chance for Rachel to – to do something, to do the right thing. Whatever the right thing is. There’s just her: a little over five feet of shaking hands and aching leg and eyepatch and fractures. She touches her tongue to her dry lips; she picks up her passport with its ticket still tucked inside. Goodbye. Goodbye, all of you. Goodbye then.

She wheels the suitcase out of the door; she closes the door; she walks, alone, down the hallway. Rachel considers Sarah – dozing on a couch somewhere, or pacing around the overlarge shape of her jangling nerves. Sarah, looking at the sky, considering this question: now what?

 _I don’t know_ , Rachel tells her. _I don’t know. I suppose we’ll have to find out_. She rolls the suitcase down the staircase, one small step at a time. When she reaches the lobby she asks them to call her a taxi.

**Author's Note:**

> Who's in a bad mood, who's in a taxi?  
> Turning the clock back, avoiding a fight with whoever she's meeting  
> Stands in the lobby, counting her questions in the neon light
> 
> With all the luck you've had  
> Why are your songs so sad?  
> Sing from a book you're reading in bed  
> And took to heart  
> All of your lives unled, reading in bed  
> \--"Reading in Bed," Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
